Peter Beilharz

The Bauman reader

Preface. 1. Introduction: Peter Beilharz: Reading Zygmunt Bauman. 2. The Telos Interview. 3. Socialism. 3.1 The Historical Location of Socalism. 3.2 Modern Times, Modern Marxism. 3.3 Communism: A Postmortem. 4. Class and Power. 4.1 Class: Before and After. 4.2 Gamekeepers Turned Gardeners. 4.3 The Rise of the Interpreter. 5. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. 5.1 The Challenge of Hermeneutics. 5.2 Critical Theory. 5.3 Modernity. 6. Sociology and the Postmodern. 6.1 A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity. 6.2 The Re--Enchantment of the World, or, How Can One Narrate Postmodernity?. 7. Figures of Modernity. 7.1 Making and Unmaking of Strangers. 7.2 Parvenu and Pariah: The Heroes and Victims of Modernity. 8. The Century of Camps. 8.1 Sociology After the Holocaust. 8.2 Dictatorship Over Needs. 8.3 A Century of Camps?. 9. Ambivalence and Ethics. 9.1 The Quest for Order. 9.2 The Social Construction of Ambivalence. 10. Globalization and the New Poor. 10.1 On Glocalization: Or Globalization for Some, Localization for Some Others. 10.2 From the Work Ethic to the Aesthetic of Consumption. 11. The Journey Never Ends, Zygmunt Bauman Talks With Peter Beilharz. Index.

Arguing about the welfare state : the Australian experience

Part 1 Arguments: welfare for citizenship - the emergence of ideals welfare as social security - from citizenship to provision. Part 2 Institutions: finding the welfare state - from arguments to institutions establishing the national welfare state in Australia. Part 3 Administration: locating welfare in administration changing the institutions of social administration.

Social Democracy and Social Justice

Much discussion of social democracy and social justice is confused by a failure to clarify terms and traditions. A scan of Swedish, German, British and Australian reformist ideologies helps to establish the correlations between these traditions and their corresponding conceptions of social justice. In its most muscular forms, the project of social democracy has a broad horizon, because it ascribes a primary value to citizenship, a position from which the Anglophone tradition can learn in its own pursuit of social justice. Social justice itself ought be recognised as a far more obvious core value for radicals, though it remains strategically significant in the Australian context today.

Rewriting Australia: The Way We Talk About Fears and Hopes

Sociologists in Australia often talk about a politics of fear, or of moral panic, in order to explain the apparent awkwardness of a situation where leftwing intellectuals cannot come to grips with a rightwing political moment. This article addresses the question of dominant images of Australia through the 20th century as a part of the dominant leftwing historiography, which has now been replaced by a rightwing political narrative. The central theoretical and historical issue here is the problem of populism, and its shift from left to right. This leads to a discussion of the politics of fear and uncertainty, and how to begin to think about them, and to questions of the role of sociologists in all this.

Review Essay: Settler Capitalism Revisited

Over the last quarter of a century, Australian historiography and political analysis has witnessed a significant shift in the dominant terms of reference for thinking about the past, and about its relationship to the present and future. By the early 1980s an influential body of thought had coalesced around the proposition that Australia’s political economy could be best understood through the lens of ‘settler’ or ‘dominion’ capitalism. These terms denote the distinctive forms that capitalism took in the white settler colonies of the British Empire and the temperate zones of South America (Ehrensaft and Armstrong, 1978; Denoon, 1983; Head, 1983; McMichael, 1984; Gerardi, 1985). The key argument was that Australia carried a pattern of family resemblances with these other settler colonies, which arose from their shared historical experience as both colonizers and colonized (Macintyre, 1989: 11). These resemblances included an early and significant degree of political autonomy from the imperial power out of which they were established; the early commodification of land and hence labour, with a corresponding absence of a large peasantry; relative economic prosperity for white settlers, including workers, despite or perhaps because of a highly dependent form of economic development that was disproportionately centred on primary production for the imperial market; mass immigration of white settlers from the metropolitan power and the attendant physical and cultural destruction, or at least the brutal subjugation, of indigenous populations. This final characteristic was the original presupposition and condition for all the other features noted. These contributed to distinctive patterns of interand intraclass relations and political institutions, which continued to shape realities in the settler colonies long after the conditions that gave rise to them had

Australia: The Unhappy Country, or, a Tale of Two Nations

What is the nature of modernity in Australia, or in the Antipodes? This article presents the view that Australia is an unhappy country because its modernity is caught between at least two different images of pasts and futures possible. There are at least two Australias, one closer to the image of modern tradition or settler capitalism, the other heading in the direction of globalism via its world cities. On contemplation, the image of doubling or pluralization spreads. For there are also at least two distinct little narratives of national foundation, one dystopic, as the halfway modern society begot by penal origins in 1788, the other utopian, as the field of the transtasman social laboratory mooted into the 20th century. These divisions resonate with the theme of the two nations, from Disraeli through to Bauman, but the logical implication of the argument for the discourse about multiple modernities suggests the pluralization rather than dualization of lifeworlds and social forms.

The Left, the Accord and the Future of Socialism

What is the future of socialism in Australia today? It can have very little future at all if we are not prepared to argue about it. These reflections are offered in this spirit, and in the spirit of an ongoing commitment to Marx’s eleventh thesis: we cannot claim to change a situation which we have not yet understood. The anniversary of the Kerr coup and the publication of Whitlam’s memoirs have helped highlight the divergence of the Hawke Government from the Whittam project. But socialists, heads down, digging their gardens or working in the apparatus, have barely attempted to make sense of this recent history.’ In 1972 the Whitlam Government came to power. White formally rejoicing the end of the Liberal iceage, the left in Australia seemed generally to be of the opinion that it was less a new beginning for socialism than for technocratic labourism. Bob Catley and Bruce McFarlane epitomised this view in their From Tweedleduni to Tweedledee; it was a view widely on the revolutionary left. The proposal that this government had been installed by economic cir-

Modernity and Communism: Zygmunt Bauman and the Other Totalitarianism

Baumans work can be understood as a critical theory, but its east European context needs to be established alongside the west European sensibilities of the Frankfurt School. The question of Soviet modernity and the status of the Polish experience of which Bauman was part need to be placed alongside the more famous critique of the Holocaust, which can be more readily aligned with Horkheimer and Adornos views in Dialectic of Enlightenment. To this end, some of Baumans essays and arguments on the Soviet and Polish experience are reviewed in order to begin to fill out this other dimension of Baumans critique of modernity and totalitarianism. Both Baumans views on eastern Europe, and my survey of them, are offered as hints for those that follow.

Reading Zygmunt Bauman: Looking for Clues

Zygmunt Baumans sociology has had a paradoxical reception, widespread, yet elusive. Partly this is due to its diversity, partly due to Baumans style, which is often provocative rather than soothing. Whatever the case, Baumans work is among the most important sources for critical sociology today. This exploratory essay, a flag for a book in progress called Modernity as Ambivalence - Zygmunt Baumans Sociology indicates some key co-ordinates: modernity and the postmodern, sociology and socialism, Marxism and after, via a scanner of some of the major works, especially Legislators and Interpreters, through Modernity and Ambivalence. Baumans work is evocative not only because of its critical or historical sensibilities, but also because of its existential and anthropological clues.

Labour’s utopias revisited

This paper revisits a book I published 20 years ago. Labour’s Utopias – Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (Routledge, 1992) began from the proposition that utopia was a ubiquitous figure in Western political and social thinking. On the Left the common sense has often been that reform and revolution are but different proposed roads to the same utopian end. Labour’s Utopias shows that this is not the case: Bolshevism, Fabianism and social democracy actually embody different ends. Revisiting the text 20 years later, my sense is that its most interesting and significant weakness lies not in its diagnosis of utopia, but in its failure to differentiate significantly between labour and its intellectual representatives. I hint at the issue of ‘social’ or ‘socialist ventriloquism’, but fail to follow it through. The issue of representation, or claims to representation, remains under-illuminated, as does the possibility that there are significant differences between working-class and middle-class utopias.